Diachronicle
DAYS 335–352 (CONTD.; EARLY JULY, YEAR 1)
In which Tristan learns a euphemism
THIS PEN WRITES NO FASTER, the eclipse is now just twenty-three days away, and I continue to entertain foolish fond thoughts that somehow I may yet escape 1851 London. I am sure I have already complained in these leaves about the stench, but as summer ripens, so too do its smells. No pension plan is worth this shit, in quite the most literal sense. I must tell this story more quickly and elide some details to get it all down.
I pled travel fatigue, and Tristan honored his word to take the next DTAP. He required a specific place to land in London, September 1601, during the week before the investor, Sir Edward Greylock, agreed to put his money into the Boston Council for Boston. This was an event we were able to date with precision from legal records. Finding a suitable landing place in that DTAP was more of a project.
During the course of our research, we obtained scans of city maps that had been drawn up circa 1600 and printed them out on huge sheets of paper that we taped up all over the walls. There, they accumulated sticky notes, pushpins, and written annotations. It was while studying one of those that Tristan let out an oath much more explicit than we usually heard from him, and jammed his finger into a smudge on a map so hard that it must have hurt. The smudge, magnified and examined, turned out to be the words YE TEAR-SHEETE BREWERY.
As mentioned previously, Tristan had a sentimental regard for Old Tearsheet Best Bitter, the flagship product of Tearsheet Beverage Group Ltd., which claimed to be one of the oldest continuously operating breweries in London. He’d spent a semester abroad in the city, and thought himself sporty for having acquired a taste for something so obscure—not quite a microbrew but neither a household name anywhere. Bottled, it was available at a select few package stores in New England. On tap, it could be had in some pubs that catered to Anglophiles and expats.
Improbable as it might sound, further research bore out that Tearsheet Beverage Group Ltd. really was the survival into modern times of the enterprise labeled on that old map. To Tristan’s delight, TBG Ltd. were proud enough of their heritage, and savvy enough with their marketing, that a section of their website was devoted to the history of their plant in London. In the early seventeenth century, the brewhouse proper had boasted an adjacent public house. It was at most two hundred yards from the Globe Theatre. Though the site did not mention it, the area had famously teemed with brothels.
I went back into the Widener Library stacks. Where I discovered—to no great surprise—that the adjacent pub was too large, with too many upstairs nooks, to have been merely a pub. Given the neighborhood, it probably wasn’t merely an inn either.
“So there it is,” said Tristan, pleased, when I showed him a map I’d scanned at Widener. “That’s my ground zero. What else do we know about it?”
“The very word ‘Tearsheet’ was a slang term for a prostitute,” I said.
He pulled a face. “I had no idea.”
“The place was famous for always having ‘six comely maidens’ working there,” I said, with air quotes, “‘serving the customers ale and aught.’”
“What’s aught?” asked Tristan.
“Whatever you want it to be,” I said. “Their names are not recorded, but as of 1600 we know that one was Irish and two were Scottish. If we’re looking for loose women who would never fit in at Elizabeth’s court, those three fit the bill. Especially the Irish one, she had to travel by sea to get there, and the seas between Ireland and England were full of pirates. And she would have almost certainly been Catholic—so why would she go there unless she had a very good reason?”
Tristan sat at his desk examining the papers. The Tearsheet website had airbrushed the map a bit. In reality, not only was the “pub” next door bigger than the brewery claimed, but it was connected, by an underground tunnel and secret passages on every floor, directly to the brewery itself—thus allowing johns who needed to remain anonymous a way to escape if the brothel were raided by the constables. Too bad none of that was on the website. I think their sales might have improved if they’d shared all the dirt.
Over the next two weeks, Tristan was on a crash course in preparing to pass as a visitor to Elizabethan London. We knew he would never get the accent right, but as with myself in Boston forty years later, this was not an urgent issue: London’s population was exploding, and the city was babbling away in different accents and dialects from all over.
A benefit to choosing this DTAP was that it corresponded with the height of William Shakespeare’s career, and American theatres are simply obsessed with Shakespeare. Therefore Boston, despite its small size, was crawling with fight choreographers who specialized in the swordplay and knife skills common in Shakespeare’s time—or at least in his playhouse. Tristan learned drills he could do on his own and then honed his skills for hours each day in the one still-separate office space in the DODO building. He also practiced bowing, cap-doffing, eating without a fork, and sundry other small niceties, whilst I drilled him on Elizabethan turns of phrase. Our costumer friend helped again with clothing, renting us a variety of different men’s outfits so that Tristan could practice putting them on and off, as we had no way of knowing what clothes he might eventually find himself in. He would be enormous by the standards of the time; the chances of his actually blending in were slim to none.
I enjoyed watching him at his drills even more than I’d enjoyed watching the ferryman row me across the Charles. I truly did not want to enjoy watching him. It seemed incestuous. I thought Tristan was a looker from the moment I’d laid eyes on him, but all of that had been swept to the back of my mind immediately because of the peculiarity of our meeting and then our unceasing work. Except for the small talk of our first meal together, we had barely ever “chatted.” Tristan, as a general rule, does not chat. I knew him so well and trusted him quite literally with my life, and yet I hardly knew him at all.
When he had been the brains of the operation, the guiding hand, the commanding officer, I somehow hadn’t noticed that . . . but now as he was in training, I became the guide, and the dynamic shifted. I became his equal, in some ways his superior, and this in turn made me proprietary. I felt secret jealousy toward the rest of his life—how absurd, as he had no “rest of his life,” and in fairness neither did I anymore. He seemed to have no friends locally, never mentioned his family, and I can’t remember him referring to any memories or relationships. He was an unformed block, from which he was now laboring, literally, to sculpt a Renaissance Man.
Reader, that was an attractive thing to watch.